


Beware The "Winch"

by Just_Make_It_A_Good_One



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-14
Updated: 2014-10-14
Packaged: 2018-02-21 03:20:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2452844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Just_Make_It_A_Good_One/pseuds/Just_Make_It_A_Good_One





	Beware The "Winch"

 

 

 

"Beware the Winch."  The young girl held the scorched piece of paper between trembling fingers, the words blurring through a curtain of tears brought on from both grief and the ash in the air around her.  Behind her, a fiery blaze that she had once called home lit the muggy night, the wood and plaster crackling and sparking, threatening the trees that circled the small house with the same fate. She lifted her head to stare through the fire and heat to where she knew her family lay, suffocated and charred. Twelve years old, Megan Price-Vaughn had just come home from a sleepover at her friend Tasha's house. Tasha's mother had dropped her at the end of the long driveway and driven off without stopping to notice the smoke in the distance. By the time Megan had arrived at the blaze, it was too late. A fire engine's siren brought Megan's thoughts back to the present, reminding her that if the authorities were to catch her, and were to look into finding her somewhere to go, they would discover that her only remaining family was long ago lost, and they would be forced to put her into foster care. 

Megan reached into the small backpack she had brought with her to the sleepover, pulling out a small shotgun. Her parents had been hunters, of course, so she was always prepared for anything and everything.  She took one final look at her life as it went up in smoke, and wiped the last tear from her pale face. She tucked the charred piece of paper, which held her mother's dying words, into her back pocket and headed through the woods to the highway, where she knew she could probably hitch a ride far, far away from here.

 

 

"Beware the Winch."

        

 

 

Nine years later, twenty-one year old Megan Price-Vaughn sat hunched over a beer in a bar in Lawrence, Kansas.  The sun low on the horizon, the late summer air hung low, muggy, and drenched in the electricity of the weather man's forecast of scattered thunderstorms. "Scattered storms my arse," she scoffed as she drew the sleeves of her black hoodie down to her knuckles, her dark red hair pulled back into a french braid and hidden beneath the hood.  Having just finished a vampire hunt that had left her with some mighty strange looking bruises, she had been forced to overdress to avoid arousing suspicion.

  "Yeah, real inconspicuous Megan," she chuckled darkly to herself.  She drained the remainder of her beer and ordered another immediately,  exchanging few words with the bartender.  Having never gotten into wearing makeup on a day to day basis, she was glad that she had  had enough foundation to cover up her black eye, though there wasn't  anything to do about the split lip.  A pair of sloshed girls wearing short  shorts and tank tops eyed Megan strangely as they giggled drunkenly  towards the exit, but she ignored them, eyes fixed on the clock on the  wall in front of her.  Any other night she would have made some  clever, biting comment that would have made those girls' eyes pop out  of their heads, but not that night.  The whole week she had spent  searching for the vampire nest, so tonight had crept up on her, silent  
and empty, as if it were almost ashamed of what it had come to mean to  her.  The bartender set her beer down in front of her, and she nodded  slightly in acknowledgement before grabbing the bottle.  She closed  her eyes as she drained a good third of the contents in one go, her  thoughts jumping from one thing to another before stopping on the  tattoo on her back.  About the size of a pack of cigarettes, the image  was of the piece of paper she had found on that terrible night; a  slightly charred, uneven around the edges scrap of paper with her  mother's final words written with precision (for someone who was about  to burn alive.)  The real note was currently sitting in an airtight  safe in a small bunker in Montana, which was about as close to a  
"home" as she had anymore.  The words still made no sense to her, as  she had never heard of any remotely supernatural entity with the name of "Winch".  She  shook her head in exhausted frustration, lifting the bottle to her  lips to wash down the pain of the morbid anniversary.  Another glance  at the clock told her that it was five minutes to nine o'clock; nine  years ago to the minute, she had checked her watch as she walked down  the long, winding driveway to her house.  Four minutes to nine; twelve  year old Megan had noticed that the air smelled of smoke.  
  
          Shuddering, Megan slammed the beer bottle down on the  coaster, spilling a little but not paying any attention to it. She  squeezed her eyes shut and breathed in deeply, trying to clear the  vivid image from her mind and the phantom smoke from her lungs. When  she reopened her eyes, nine o'clock had come and gone, but at least  her heart rate had returned to normal. Her hands still shaking almost  unnoticeably, Megan fidgeted in her seat a little, turning to look out  through the tall, grimy windows of the bar. She wasn't the only one of t he bar's patrons to see the first faint flash of lightening in the  distance, as the place emptied considerably within the next few  minutes. Megan remained seated, finishing off her beer and ordering  another before sweeping the bar with a glance to take inventory of the remaining  drunks, whom Megan deemed unworthy of her concern. Thunder rumbled  outside, and Megan watched the first raindrops splatter against the  windows just as a tall, scruffy looking man walked through the front  door. Megan turned at the sound of the heavy front door slamming shut, watching as this newcomer approached the bar and sat down. She  eyed him with mild curiosity, before remembering that she wasn't at  all in the mood for speaking to anyone. She turned back to face  forward, adjusting the hood slightly to shield her eyes from the  increasingly frequent flashes of lightening that lit up the room. Not once did it occur to her, however, as she was sitting there, how her  tireless searching for an answer to the mystery that haunted her every  waking moment had been in vain, because fate had other plans. Little  did she know that not only would her answer present itself in an  entirely different way than she had thought, but that she would soon  come to realize that she should never have gone looking in the first  place. It had never occurred to her that maybe what she was looking  for was wrong. It had never occurred to her that maybe she hadn't even  received the whole message in the first place.  It had never occurred  to her that maybe her mother hadn't finished writing before she died, nor had it occurred to her that she was about to find out what the unfinished note meant.


End file.
